Joshua Tree (1993)

This week’s selection for the Fridays of Fury Action Club, check out upcoming movie picks and join here.

Joshua Tree is a 1993 action film also released under the title of Army of One. It was the directorial debut of Vic Armstrong, a legendary stuntman who doubled for Harrison Ford on some of his biggest movies (Armstrong is the one doing the jump from horse to tank in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!). Armstrong also did second-unit directing on many films before and after this (including Total Recall, Charlie’s Angels [where he would have worked with Yuen Cheung-Yan], a Mission Impossible and a Mummy). His only other features as director are the version of Left Behind with Nicolas Cage (2014) and something called A Sunday Horse (2016). The man is obviously a legend for his stunt work and has worked consistently and at a high level in his second-unit directing, but based on Joshua Tree I don’t think we missed out on an amazing action auteur by not having him in the main director’s chair more often.

Dolph Lundgren stars as Santeen, a former race car driver hauling a shady transport. I was excited to see his trucker buddy Eddie is played by Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead). However, seeing how far down the opening credits Foree’s name appeared, I worried he was not long for this world. Sure enough, the guys get pulled over by a cop and Eddie gets killed before the first scene is over! Santeen is also shot and left for dead, and ends up framed for killing the cop. 

the "American trucker look" is very funny on the giant Swede

Nine months later, Santeen is healed up and being transported when a guard tries to kill him. Santeen gets shot again (he will hold up surprisingly well over the course of the movie despite dealing with both fresh and recently healed bullet wounds) and escapes, stealing a truck at a gas station and taking its owner hostage. That would be the gorgeous Rita (Kristian Alfonso) and her fantastic bangs (which will also hold up surprisingly well over the course of the movie despite wind and abuse).

Unknown to Santeen, Rita is actually a cop. Santeen is pursued by Lieutenant Severance (George Segal), a shady cop with ties to his past. I mostly know Segal from his sitcom work over the last 25 years, so it was odd seeing him play that same kind of gruff but schtick-y demeanor while also spitting racial epithets and hitting his wife. It also felt sadly accurate that doing both of those things in public didn’t raise a single eyebrow from his fellow cops. “We never knew he was dirty, we just thought he was a good old-fashioned racist wife-beater like the rest of us!”

This is a fairly entertaining B-movie that moves at a decent pace. Joshua Tree National Park provides lots of beautiful shooting locations. I am glad I saw the widescreen version instead of the full-frame version that was the only one available for a long time, that really would have reduced the grandeur of the vistas.

The plot follows Santeen as he meets up with various people that reveal his past to the audience and Rita over the course of the movie (including Newsradio’s Khandi Alexander as Eddie’s widow!) on his path to vengeance. There is a lot of driving and car chases, lots of whipping turns and rolling vehicles (and unfortunately a fair amount of obviously sped up footage driving around mountain roads). It holds off on the real action for a while until a big John Woo-inspired warehouse shootout near the halfway point. Here is where we come to a major problem. These action scenes just don’t pop for me. They aren’t boring, there are some decent squibs, explosions, and the occasional fun moments, but they just don’t flow well or wow me in any way.

This sequence also reminded me of an old bugaboo I had in the 90s: Western filmmakers wanting to imitate John Woo or Hong Kong-style action, but not fully committing to the unreality of it. Sometimes a character in a Hong Kong movie might be sliding or rolling on an actual object, but they are also frequently just launching off of nothing. They are sliding across floors and flying through the air spraying bullets in action beats influenced by the style and effects of old school wuxia wire-work. Western filmmakers always seemed to worry that high-flying action was too silly or crazy, so instead they have to stick in some practical element to explain it, like Santeen laying on a plank rolling down a conveyor belt. And in this case the flow and editing of the whole thing are off. There are too many cuts, including random close-ups of guns firing. The wide-angle shots of him rolling with guns blazing and any other potentially cool compositions are too short to appreciate. It is too chopped up and slowed down to build energy and then the whole thing just keeps going, seconds past the point where it has lost any coolness and long enough that logic starts to creep in and you wonder why no one has hit him rolling down this set path for like 20 seconds.

I can’t think of any other specific movies right now, but I know I saw similar scenes play out multiple times in this era of American action. Someone rolling or sliding on something for way too long shooting a bunch of people blandly while still somehow looking more ridiculous than their Hong Kong equivalent kicking off a wall to fly 8 feet through the air firing guns only to roll over a table, kick off of that and slide 8 feet across the floor still firing. That is another piece American imitators often missed, the constant variety and escalation of moves and environment work, not just one extended gimmick. Over the course of the 90s, more Hong Kong directors and action choreographers would start working in Hollywood and the action became more elaborate and over-the-top in line with their styles, but before that the only Western imitator that I remember capturing that Hong Kong energy and excess was Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado. 

One thing that I enjoyed and stood out to me was Lundgren’s anti-hero and his small-stakes story. It feels much more like a 1970s crime story pumped up with 1980s-style action. Santeen has a code and is trying to help out his dead buddy’s family in addition to seeking revenge, so he is not quite a pure bastard like Richard Stark’s Parker and its adaptations/imitators. But he definitely isn’t a good-natured one-liner machine. He isn’t heroic or fighting for the greater good. He is generally an asshole, and not in an endearing way (the “nicest” thing Santeen does is grab a child half his size and shake the hell out of him when trying to scare him straight!).

He isn’t nice to Rita from the start, and after she tries to escape he just starts pulling her around by the hair and arms, shoving and kicking her (I can’t imagine it is comfortable getting pulled around by Lundgren’s huge arms!). That is understandable behavior for his character, but it makes their inevitable hook-up a lot harder to swallow. 

they have fun!

When we first meet Rita, she is breaking up with her fellow-cop boyfriend because she their relationship is too “nice and comfortable." This could have worked if we saw some kind of burgeoning attraction where Rita actually likes Santeen’s hard edges or rough treatment and enjoys their dangerous adventure together. If that’s her kink so be it, but the movie gives no indication that she likes him or enjoys any of this until it's time for them to hook up. Instead she just goes from “don’t like him, he’s a criminal” to “actually he might be innocent so I should risk my life to help him” to “well my boyfriend just got shot in the head so I guess its time to fuck.” My wife even called the sex scene a few minutes before it happened, and I was like “No way, her boyfriend JUST died!” but she was right. It's a shame because Rita is more capable and active than many female characters in action movies (especially for the 80s/early 90s), but the writers still have to slot her into the usual scenarios. I was especially frustrated when Santeen (now with ANOTHER gunshot wound) tries to leave her behind during the climax even after she has both saved AND nearly kicked his ass previously!

The gratuitous sex scene also ends up not being a sex scene, they make out a little then it just turns into weird close-ups of them rubbing aloe on each other until they are interrupted. So it hurt the character and didn’t even provide any titillation in the trade (unless you are really into back lotioning). The movie had no problem objectifying Rita/Kristian Alfonso with plenty of close-ups/insert shots of her toned legs, ass, and chest up to this point (and why was she wearing sparkly mini-dress to break up with her boyfriend at lunch?), so it's odd that the one scene where that's expected is cut short.

Santee is a limited character that Lundgren doesn’t bring much extra to other than his size and stare. Maybe someone else with more charisma could have made the character more compelling in ways the script didn’t, but I don’t know how much that would improve things. Despite the thin characterization and plot (once it is fully revealed), I still enjoyed all that stuff (and the location shooting) more than the mediocre action.

Lundgren definitely improved over the years, though. His brief monologue about his character's endless conflict in Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009) was genuinely haunting and has stuck with me for a long time. Then he got to go the opposite route and deliver a rousing speech to his troops in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012). It is almost unfair that Lundgren became a decent actor considering how much else he had going on. If he was just a tall, handsome, ripped drummer/martial artist with a Chemical Engineering degree who became the bodyguard and boyfriend to Grace Jones, that would already be a crazy life story, but then he started acting and had a whole other career/life ahead of him. And even beyond his memorable turns in the two latter-day UniSol movies, it will be this old clip of him from a Swedish music competition show that will live rent free in my head forever: